Bio
Julie Josse is a Senior Researcher at Inria, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, where she leads the PreMeDICaL team (Precision Medicine by Data Integration and Causal Learning) in collaboration with Inserm, France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research. Her team develops methodological and computational approaches for precision medicine, combining causal learning and federated methods that preserve medical data privacy. Their goal is to accelerate the development of targeted therapies and to design reliable clinical decision-support systems with quantified prediction uncertainty. Her research lies at the intersection of statistics and machine learning, with a focus on missing data, causal inference, and the analysis of multi-source and multi-modal health data. Through these methods, she aims to improve data-driven decision-making in areas such as respiratory diseases, oncology, and reproductive medicine. She also led the Traumatrix project, which developed AI-based decision-support tools to optimize trauma care in ambulance settings. Julie is a strong advocate for reproducible research and actively contributes to the development of open-source R software. She received her PhD in Statistics in 2010. Her dissertation was awarded the Best PhD Prize in Applied Statistics by the French Statistical Society. In 2013, she was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from the European Union and spent 18 months as a visiting researcher at Stanford University.Before joining Inria in 2020, she was a Professor of Statistics at École Polytechnique (IPP). During that time, she also directed the Master’s program in Data Science for Business, a joint program with HEC Paris, and was a visiting researcher at Google Brain Paris. In 2024, she received the Inria–French Academy of Sciences Young Researchers Prize.
Perso: I had the privilege of growing up in Africa and French Polynesia experiences that shaped my curiosity and outlook on life. Later, I moved to Brittany, a stunning region of France, before discovering the vibrancy of Paris and now enjoying life in the sunny south of France. Beyond my passion for statistics, I love traveling—an adventure that began on horseback in my youth—and exploring the world’s beauty. I’m captivated by nature and science, avidly following resources like Science Friday and admiring initiatives like Wildlife Photographer of the Year. I also have a strong interest in humanitarian issues and aspire to apply my skills more directly to such causes in the future.
Outreach: Blog binaire la recherche; Interview in Academie des technologies (French, English) – Interview in Montpellier – Interview in medium.